Barkley may reject being a role model—that’s what family and friends are for, he says. But as someone who demands that kids...
Uncontroversial, positive opinions from former NBA standout Barkley.
Barkley hardly deserves his reputation for being a loose cannon. His more notorious utterances were routinely taken out of context; if he did make a serious personal mistake, as when he spit at a heckler and the gob hit a young girl, he made good his apology and learned from the error. More to the point, his reputation for being a rebarbative figure hinges on his urge to address serious issues—the prevalence of racism, the need for education, the emptiness of taking celebrities as role models—in a forthright fashion. Yet he also appreciates the reality of “star power” and the responsibility it entails: not just to play the best he can for team and fans, but to put big social issues on the table and keep people talking about them. This may mean calling Augusta National on its discriminatory policies—though he is curiously silent on its treatment of women, something that obviously deserves at least a mention—while at the same time noting that “Tiger winning at Augusta allows a whole lot of people an easy way to feel better about ugly shit like exclusion.” Much is made of Barkley’s Republicanism, and he does evince a strong fondness for money, but he comes across here as more of a Vermonter: thrifty, plain-speaking, hardworking, with a sense of responsibility and a love of his craft. Is a true baddie really about to say, “There’s no way God allowed me to make all this money, meet all the people I’ve met, and rise to this status just to sit around, count my money, and not to try to help people improve their lives”?
Barkley may reject being a role model—that’s what family and friends are for, he says. But as someone who demands that kids think and assume responsibility, he’s headed in the right direction.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-50883-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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